Welcome to the website of Emile Woolf

Over a span of 45 years I have acted as teacher, lecturer, best-selling author of professional texts, practising accountant, forensic expert witness and, throughout this period, one of the profession’s most widely read columnists and magazine journalists. My subject range includes the wider spectrum of economics, taxation and any related developments that have a financial dimension, always seeking to identify the principle that lies behind the dilemma.

Commendations

Wonderful, Emile. I really like the stories. I think that is how people get "hooked" on reading a rather scholarly article such as yours.

This paragraph of yours about demand could be the focus of a follow-up essay:

The fallacy underlying the whole charade begins with the belief that creating jobs creates demand - and that demand will, on its own, generate economic growth. However, that doesn’t happen, and it’s not how economic growth occurs anyway. Remember: (i) it is in the nature of the human condition that there can never be a shortage of demand; but (ii) if it is not preceded by commercially evaluated production, demand is completely useless and can never be satisfied.

Keynesian economics--the headlong pursuit of increasing aggregate demand--is a failed attempt to refute Say's Law. Production must precede consumption. This is irrefutable; i.e., one cannot consume what has not been produced. One's production becomes the currency by which one consumes, via an indirect medium of exchange (money). Dr. Frank Shostak is fond of reminding his readers that all REAL exchanges are exchanges of something for something. Keynesian exchanges, especially via money printing, are exchanges of something for nothing and are nothing more than rationales for capital consumption.So few understand the importance of Say's Law. It could use your special touch that reaches so many.

Patrick Barron, Professor of Economics, Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin